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Reading a story in the Washington Post on Friday about the on-going controversy surrounding the USPTO’s teleworking scheme, I wondered again about a claim made recently by the agency’s director Michelle Lee that the US has a world class patent system. It was a line in a speech on 6th July in which she outlined why she supported further legislative reform: “As I’ve said before, it’s important that these changes reduce the incentives for harmful litigation
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In the latest issue of IAM magazine – available for subscribers to view online from today – Matthew Beers and Maria Lazarova of Ocean Tomo take a deep-dive look at patent abandonments data from both the USPTO and EPO. The full article contains a wealth of interesting data but, for the purposes of this blog we’ll take a sneak peek at the findings relating to IP owners and which of them abandon the most patents at both agencies. Perhaps unsurprisingly, about
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Issue 73 of IAM has been published online and is available for subscribers. Hard copies are in the post and should be hitting door mats and desk tops next week.
In this issue’s cover story, we explain why the technology revolution in the auto industry has resulted in the sector’s wholehearted embrace of patents and explore how further advancements are likely to accelerate the process. Some believe that these trends are bound to lead to an uptick in litigation; others are not so
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Yesterday the pharmaceutical company Celgene filed a motion for sanctions against Kyle Bass and Erich Spangenberg and their Coalition for Affordable Drugs, accusing them of abusing the inter partes review (IPR) process. In what has quickly become the patent story of the year Bass and Spangenberg have filed a series of IPRs against what they see as weak pharmaceutical patents that should never have been issued. Earlier this month we published an interview with Bass in which he stressed that
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It increasingly looks like we are on the cusp of entering a second round of smartphone patent wars, driven by the expansion of China’s fast-moving, lower-end mobile device manufacturers outside of their home markets. Earlier this month, Brazil’s competition regulator – the Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Economica (CADE) – handed down a decision that underlines just how important South America’s largest and most populous country could prove to be if this new
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The multi-year, worldwide and ongoing litigation battle between ZTE and non-practising entity (NPE) Vringo took an interesting twist last week when a series of internal ZTE documents were filed with a New York court. The documents, which largely consist of communications between ZTE staff, detail how the Chinese telecom company has set out to wage a “PR battle” against Vringo as the pair faced off over a series of patent infringement cases.
They also throw light on ZTE’s
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Chinese investment firm GSR Capital yesterday announced the launch of a $5 billion M&A fund, which it said would be used for large-scale buyouts of western technology companies in sectors including life sciences, wireless communications and clean energy. Chairman Sonny Wu told Bloomberg that the firm will mainly target European businesses, in what could be another sign that the future home of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) is set to become the prime destination for Chinese
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The pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries seem to be stepping up their attempts to secure a carve-out for biopharmaceutical patents from the IPR process. Last week, Jim Greenwood, the president and CEO of BIO and John Castellani, the president and CEO of PhRMA, put together an opinion piece for The Hill in which they claimed that: “Predatory hedge funds are short-selling the stock of patent-dependent companies, then challenging the companies’ legitimate patents at the
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Since launching its first IP aggregation fund in April 2014, Beijing-based IP consultancy firm Zhigu has focused on obtaining Chinese patent assets from the domestic research sector. But assignments data suggests that the outfit has recently stepped up efforts to acquire intellectual property from foreign companies in order to expand its global portfolio.
IAM reported on Zhigu last year when it initiated Ruichuan IPR Funds, which was hailed in the Chinese press
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Google is at it again - trying to solve the ills of the patent world with another initiative, this time aimed at giving a helping hand to the start-up community. Or at least, that’s how the company is pitching it. The search giant announced the launch of the Patent Starter Program yesterday. This will see it give some of its patents away for free.
As part of the scheme Google will transfer two patent families to the first 50 eligible start-ups that sign up. The company will then give
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